by Bill Hopkins
“Say that again.”
“She looks peaceful.”
“No, she looks dead.” Rosswell touched the identification bracelet. “Who does she look like?”
“Like a Madonna painting. The Blessed Virgin.”
Rosswell motioned to Ollie. “There’s writing on this bracelet. Can you make it out?”
In the gloom, Ollie leaned close to the woman’s wrist, shining his flashlight. “Initials. M is the first letter.”
Rosswell groaned. “D is next and H is the last one.”
Ollie inspected the bracelet. “Yeah. MDH.”
“Madonna. Mary Donna Helperen from Piggott, Arkansas. Swimming champion at the University of Arkansas. Working on her physics doctorate.” Rosswell rubbed his hands on his pants. “Her parents are Norwegian immigrants. She’s a missing woman who looks like Tina.”
Ollie interlaced his fingers. “Nathaniel killed this innocent woman.”
Rosswell cleaned the end of his right forefinger and touched the woman’s body, hoping to make contact with her, hoping to show her that someone cared how and why she’d died.
Examining the blood on the gown, he said, “I suspect she may have died of hemorrhaging.” With the tip of his finger, he lifted the gown up. “Yes. Someone performed a Caesarean section on her and didn’t even bother to sew her back up. She died in childbirth.”
“How long has she been dead?”
Rosswell pressed the back of his hand against her face. “Not long. She’s still warm.” After visually examining her from head to toe, Rosswell pointed. “The only part of her that is dirty is the back of her feet. She has muddy heels.”
“How do you think she got in the cave?”
“This is the woman I saw tossed off the ferry.”
“What?” Ollie gasped and stood. “She died in childbirth and they brought her to this nasty cave?”
Rosswell also stood and worked his phone out of his pocket and snapped several pictures of Mary Donna Helperen.
The horror was plain in Ollie’s voice. “What in God’s name do you think’s going on here?”
“She didn’t drown.” Rosswell replaced his phone. “Somebody rescued her. Probably Charlie and Ribs. And they gave her to Nathaniel.”
“What did he want with her?”
“Her baby.”
Outside, the heat of the night chased the chill from Rosswell, reviving him. “I thought I was going to freeze to death in there.” He bent to the ground and finished wiping the snake grue from his hands the best he could. Kneeling, he breathed deeply for a few minutes to keep from puking. “Where are my shoes?”
Ollie handed Rosswell his shoes, then sat, putting his own shoes on. “We need to get to the truck and go find the sheriff.”
“I’ve regained my senses. I’m going back in and take a video of her. In five minutes, the whole universe will see the corpse on YouTube.”
“Then we go find the sheriff. He can’t ignore our evidence.”
“I hope Gustave can stop me from killing that bastard. I mean, those bastards. But if he won’t help, then we’ll go to the Highway Patrol.” Rosswell stood and put a hand out, stopping Ollie from moving. “Be still.” Holding his breath, he closed his eyes and listened. Sounds in the back of the cave. Someone coming to check on them. He whispered, “Let’s go. Slow. Easy. Quiet.”
Ollie nodded.
“I should throw both of you jokers in jail,” Gustave told Ollie and Rosswell after they’d finished their story. The eastern sky grew pink as the three men congregated inside the sheriff’s station. The air conditioner rattled, pouring out stale, yet cool, air, a welcome relief from the humidity and heat of the dawn. “I’d have to by God strip you naked and hose you down, you stink so bad. And then do a body cavity search. I’ve done that before to other prisoners and I can sure do it to you two.”
Rosswell fervently hoped he’d not have to witness Ollie being strip searched. “Go right ahead, Sheriff.” Ollie squirmed. Rosswell paid no mind to Ollie’s obvious discomfort at his casual offer to go to jail after a strip search.
Unwilling to abandon his aching desire to poke Gustave in the chest with his finger, Rosswell leaned over the counter separating the taxpayers from the law enforcement officers. But he had a stroke of common sense and resisted the urge to grab the sheriff’s shirt to draw him close to his own face. “Throw us in a cell. But first, you need to arrest Nathaniel and Turk for murder.” Rosswell left mud on the counter.
Gustave slammed a palm flat in front of Rosswell. “Don’t lean your dirty arms on the furniture and don’t tell me how to do my job.”
Ollie remained seated on a bench next to the door, under a light, silent as a mouse searching a church at midnight for a crumb of food.
Rosswell said, “There’s a body in that cave and it’s the woman I saw murdered.” The latter was for dramatic effect since he now knew that Mary Donna hadn’t died when she was thrown in the Mississippi.
Gustave edged closer to a full-scale rant. “You and that…that research assistant of yours come in here and expect me to believe some cockamamie story about being tied up and thrown in a cave with a woman’s body and then escaping after killing a giant serpent.”
“I didn’t say it was a giant serpent. I said it was a big copperhead.”
“Let me see your phone.” Rosswell slapped it into Gustave’s palm. The sheriff clicked through the photo album. The purpose of Gustave’s finger movements was clear. The sheriff was deleting the pictures Rosswell had taken of the dead woman. When Gustave finished, he deposited the phone in Rosswell’s palm. “Nothing here. Forgot to get pictures of the dead redhead?”
From the bench, Ollie piped up. “Strawberry blonde.”
Gustave glowered at Ollie before facing Rosswell. “You all weren’t out there at Nathaniel’s earlier were you? Oh, say, setting off fire alarms? Or burglar alarms?”
“Now why would we do something like that? I already told you we followed your auntie’s clues and went searching in the cave. We found what she called ‘much treasure.’ The woman’s body. And we got caught by Nathaniel and Turk.”
Gustave unwrapped one of his black cigars and started chewing on it. “Why in the hell did you go out there in the middle of the night?”
“Don’t you ever smoke those things?”
“Answer the damn question.”
“Simple.” Rosswell paused, trying to think of a simple explanation for doing something extraordinarily stupid like exploring a cave with wimpy flashlights. “We didn’t want to make it obvious.”
“Sure failed there.” Gustave chomped so hard on the cigar that he bit part of it off. He spit it on the floor. “I need to run both of you on the breathalyzer.”
“Boot it up. We’re ready.”
“Instead, I’m kicking you out of my office.” Gustave marched to the front door, opened it, and waved them out. “I’m not even writing a report on this, Judge Carew. I have a smidgen of respect for the court in general, although I wonder about you in particular.”
Ollie stepped out of the office. Gustave jerked Rosswell back in and shut the door. “Don’t cross me, Judge. I’ll find you if you do. Remember that.”
He pushed Rosswell out and slammed the door after him.
On the stoop, Ollie glanced over his shoulder at the door. “Cranky bastard.”
“He’s been up all night. Same as us.”
“Maybe we need to talk to the Highway Patrol. Or the FBI. That woman could’ve been kidnapped. That would make it a federal case, right?”
Rosswell wiped his face with a shirtsleeve. “What woman?”
Ollie’s face contorted. Rosswell knew what usually came next.
“Ollie, so help me God, if you squeak around me anymore I’m going to shoot you.”
“You’re saying that even if we could convince a cop to go out there, nothing would be found?”
“Nathaniel is fuming, prepping to go ballistic. Since he no doubt already knows we escaped from the cave, he’ll
move the body and take out after us both. We’re dead men. Good thing I sent those pictures to my email. My executor may find them interesting.” Rosswell checked the photos on his phone. “Gustave missed the ones of Tina.”
The sun, now fully risen, flooded the courthouse square with light, every building either sharing part of the sunrise or standing mute in a shadow. The ancient bricks of various shades reflected a light that ranged from deep red to a smoky orange. Two children ran down the sidewalk between the church and the courthouse. A man swept the front steps of a shop. On each street corner, the garden club had planted huge pots of flowers, now being watered by a beautiful girl in a mini-skirt. A gang of early-rising senior citizens disgorged from a tour bus and streamed into Mabel’s. They joked and laughed.
“Peaceful and normal.” Rosswell hardly dared to breathe when the clearness of the sky seemed to engulf him. “This place is so beautiful. Hard to believe all this crap is going on.”
“Yeah, there’s enough blue sky to make a man a pair of pants. Before you get too philosophical, let’s head over to Mabel’s for breakfast.” Ollie ran his nose over his arms, then did the same to Rosswell. “We best clean up first.”
Rosswell said, “Can you make a video out of the pictures I took of Mary Donna?”
“Is the bear in the woods Catholic?”
Rosswell pushed aside several snappy retorts and handed Ollie a slip of paper. “Here’s my user ID and password for my email. Get those pictures and post them to YouTube.”
“Doing that is signing our death warrant.”
“Gustave and Nathaniel already threatened to kill me if I crossed either of them. I’m sure you’re included.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Let’s eat first. By the looks of them, the old codgers aim to eat up the whole breakfast buffet. And I need my strength if I’m going to kill Nathaniel before he kills us. Killing Nathaniel will energize me enough to kill Turk.” Rosswell soaked in the beauty of the morning. “And then I might have to kill Gustave.”
Chapter 21
Friday Night
After cleaning up and then wolfing down Mabel’s breakfast that morning, Rosswell had sat on the bench all day, estimating that he’d drunk a gallon of coffee before leaving the courthouse. In between cases, he’d grown tense when chatting with every law enforcement agent he knew resulted in zero interest. The only evidence he could produce was the photographs he’d emailed to himself.
“No body, no crime,” one of them said. “PhotoShop,” another said. A third said, “We’re working on crimes with real evidence.”
The only one he hadn’t spoken to was Jim Bill Evans, whose incoming voicemail message promised to return the call if you left your name with a brief message. Why Rosswell had bothered trying to convince anyone else but the fire marshal was a puzzle his fatigued brain couldn’t handle.
That afternoon, consuming a huge portion of Mrs. Bolzoni’s deluxe lasagna (chicken, beef, three kinds of cheese) roused the sleep monster in Rosswell. After supper, he aimed himself for the stairs to answer the call of his bed. He hadn’t slept since Wednesday night. He knew that the instant he plummeted into the bed that neither the caffeine mixed with the anxiety of the day nor the sunshine of the late afternoon would bother him. Plunging into the depths of a dreamless sleep sounded glorious.
Mrs. Bolzoni blocked the staircase. “Don’t go to the bed yet. You must meet someone.”
“I’m very tired.” Fatal exhaustion was too weak a phrase to describe what he felt. Rosswell’s muscles screamed as if he’d been beaten by back alley thugs. His eyes, sandy as a beach, felt like Captain LaFaire had welded anchors to his eyelids. “I’d have to die to feel better.”
“This won’t be long in taking. You stay out all night and come back after wrestling in mud. And the smell not good either. Smell like dead fish. I wash your clothes twice today. They still are dirty. You should get new.”
“Ollie and I had a lot of errands to run. I had a flat tire on the truck. It was a mess getting it changed.” What was a little black lie after all the felonies he’d committed? He stifled a belch, tasting the lasagna again. Gas-X made his to-do list before he hit the sack. “I can’t think anymore. I have to sleep.”
“As if.” Her eyes opened wide, magnified by the thick lenses of her spectacles. “I thank the saints the clothes they don’t stink of the booze.”
“That’s because I didn’t drink any booze.”
Although he assured himself that she hadn’t invited Nathaniel to The Four Bee to meet with him, he made what he hoped was a careless gesture: double-checking to make sure his pistol was in its proper place. It was there, holstered at the small of his back under his shirt.
Rosswell said, “Whom do you want me to meet?”
“Whom? Why you talk of this whom? It’s not proper to talk of a lady’s whom.”
“Not womb, Mrs. Bolzoni. Whom is the pronoun used when it’s the object of a verb or a preposition.”
“Not nice to proposition a lady about her womb.”
Rosswell felt the migraine sneaking up on him again. “What is the name of the person you want me to meet?”
“We wait on porch. You see.”
They parked on the porch swing in the evening breeze, listening to the tree frogs belching invitations to prospective mates. Mrs. Bolzoni’s chattering caused a dark fog to envelop Rosswell. He had to pinch himself several times to stay awake.
Presently, an aqua colored Honda Civic with dark tinted windows drove up in front of The Four Bee. Rosswell guessed it to be a ‘98 or ‘99. Why those cars needed a spoiler was a mystery he’d never solved. Eyeing the sloping fin on the top of the trunk, Rosswell assigned its place in the universe as a waste of space. No Civic could ever go fast enough to require help from a spoiler to stay on the ground. And his truck sounded better than this bug fart car any day of the week and twice on Sunday. Although he doubted that Nathaniel would drive such a vehicle, he kept his gun hand free.
“Hmmph.”
“What’s this you say?”
“Clearing my throat, Mrs. Bolzoni.”
A woman, tall and slender with strawberry blonde hair, stepped from the car.
She looked like Tina. And the woman who was thrown off the boat.
Mrs. Bolzoni popped up and ran to meet the car’s driver. They hugged and air kissed.
“Alessandra, I have someone for you must to meet. The Judge Ross Carew.”
“Rosswell Carew,” he said, with a slight emphasis on his first name, as he also rose and joined the two women. “Glad to meet you, Alessandra.”
He offered his hand but didn’t bother with the cliché And your mother’s told me all about you. Alessandra wouldn’t want her mother telling all about her to a stranger. Alessandra was in rehabilitation. They shook hands. Her handshake was firm, her palm dry. Although he couldn’t name the perfume, he detected the smell of lilacs, similar to the perfume that Tina wore. A glance inside the car assured him that she was alone.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Alessandra said. “I believe my mother is quite taken with you.”
Mrs. Bolzoni issued a loud shushing sound. “The judge is a good man who doesn’t cook the menthol.”
“What?”
“I’m a law-abiding citizen.”
Except for an occasional felony here and there. And were you at River Heights Villa during the latest false alarm? Did you know about the dead woman in the cave? Maybe you’re here spying for your boss man, Nathaniel Dahlbert. That’s it. A spy. How else to explain your rapid rehabilitation? Mighty strange that the program for drunks took you such a short time to complete up there at the big house.
Alessandra said, “That’s a good thing for a judge to follow all the rules.” Her face reddened slightly.
Mrs. Bolzoni said, “She’s smart girl. Got lots of colleges. I seen her in lots of plays, too. Great acting woman. And best of all, Alessandra is moving in with me. These old bones not spry no more. And the bowels, the
y in uproar most of the time. Last night, it was awful—”
“Momma.” Alessandra said one word to quiet her mother. Rosswell knew the daughter had been subjected to gazillions of her mother’s stories. Missing one from last night wouldn’t upset Alessandra.
“I look forward to having you help your mother.”
Alessandra’s green eyes stared into Rosswell’s, giving him a feeling that she knew more about him than what she was saying. Drunks can spot each other. “Judge, you’ll never know I’m around. If I’m not working, I’ll be reading. I bought a book at Discovered Treasures. The Complete History of Sainte Genevieve County, Missouri by Marie Vienneau.”
Hearing the title of the book he was also currently reading convinced Rosswell that someone had been following him, and that Alessandra was definitely working for Nathaniel, but he decided to keep his mouth shut.
“I’m sure your mother appreciates your help. You’ll be a lot of company for her.”
“And keep them frogs away, Alessandra will. No need for them frogs—”
“Momma.”
“You bring in your luggages.”
Alessandra clicked a button on her key ring and the trunk of her car opened. “A couple of suitcases. I travel light.”
Rosswell took the hint. “Let me carry them in for you.”
When they both stood at the trunk, out of Mrs. Bolzoni’s sight and hearing, Alessandra whispered, “I need to talk to you. It’s important.”
Rosswell nodded and then he and Alessandra followed Mrs. Bolzoni to Alessandra’s room, right next to Rosswell’s. How convenient.
But all he could think of was that Alessandra wasn’t the woman he was looking for.
Chapter 22
Saturday Noon
Rosswell overslept, missed Mrs. Bolzoni’s breakfast, and then scurried to Mabel’s, thinking he was so hungry he could eat a horse and chase its rider.
Inside, the restaurant resembled a sardine can overstuffed by a madman. The noise level rose to the volume of a big gang fight in a small alley, but Rosswell couldn’t find anyone actually shouting. Myriad normal conversations piled one on top of the other, ballooning into cacophony.